The story I told you about earlier this year, “Bandits,” was published today in The Puritan, an ejournal out of Toronto that is run by Spencer Gordon and Tyler Willis. It was supposed to come out a little earlier, right around the same time that my story “We gotta save the leg” was published by Little Fiction, but there were some technical issues that slowed it down. Works out pretty good in the end though, as now I get to write separate posts about the new story and harass people online in a whole other set of aggressive emails, posts, and tweets.

You can read the story online, for free, if you click on this line. Also, you should probably download the whole issue as a PDF, and read stories by Amy Jones and Eric Lloyd Blix, as well as a bunch of poyems and a couple of reviews. A lot of work goes into these journals, whether they’re print or digital, so reading some free awesomeness is a pretty painless way to lend your support.

I did a ton of other content for the guys at The Puritan, including an audio clip you can listen to by clicking the little speaker icon you find partway through the story. This will take you to the reading if you click it. Or you can click THIS, and head right there. Enjoy my manly voice, hoser/hillbilly accent, and the sound of a man trying to record and edit audio on Garage Band in his living room between beers.

The rest of the content, including a bunch of questions I answered for those fellows about the history of the story, the process of writing it, and about writers and stories that matter, will be made available at some point on The Town Crier. Which is the blog that The Puritan folks run year round. I’ll post more as the content shows up, but you can always check out The Town Crier right here and perhaps it’ll be on there. If not, they also post a bunch of stuff about literary events and whatnot around Toronto. So if you’re in or near the city you might want to have a look periodically to see what is going on around here.

Lastly, I got to thank Andrew Sullivan. An Oshawa bred and Toronto based writer who works as an associate editor for The Puritan, who pulled this story from the slushpile and got it to Spencer and Tyler. It is a longer story and those are hard to land, so I couldn’t be happier about it ending up in The Puritan: Issue XXI. The Little Fiction story seemed to get a fair number of eyeballs on it, and hopefully the same goes for this one. Anyway, thanks to all of the people that worked on this story. As far as the guys I just mentioned, Spencer and Andrew both have collections of stories out there, and Tyler just took part in a very good interview in Open Book Toronto about the local literary journal scene. Here are the links: Sullivan. Gordon. Willis.

So yeah, give the story a read and see what you think. For Simcoe Country veterans, the subject matter that the story is based on will probably be awful familiar. And there is a shit-ton more of that kind on nonsense to work from. Probably almost too much of it. For everybody else, please ponder the mysteries of this bizarre geographical region, and give me a high five some day for making it outta there in one piece, more or less…

Like I said, I’ll post more when I see it. Thanks to all those who take the time to read the story or these posts. Everyone else can get bent. Nobody likes them anyway.

Cheers,

Hardcastle